Pages tagged "Trump"

With Donald Trump’s repeated attempts at executive orders to halt the Refugee Resettlement Program and to halt immigration from certain majority Muslim nations, the focus of many (and rightly so) has been centered on that front. Daily news images of refugees, their families, and the protests which took place at what seems like every major airport have shown this new administration that the opposition is real and that it is strong. But with all the attention focused on those executive orders, a secondary piece of news has largely been able to pass by without much attention from the media; and that is our new president’s feelings about torture. President Trump’s views on the subject, in combination with the similar views held by Supreme Court nominee Neil M. Gorsuch, should be of extraordinary concern to us all.

When I was a senior in college, my roommates and I had a fairly large cardboard sign that covered the entire front window of our apartment. On this sign, in giant black Sharpie block letters, were written the words “Torture Creates Terrorists.” It was a heady decision for a group of young, privileged, white males who considered themselves, if not yet radicals or even progressives, at the very least solid liberals. It was 2009, Barack Obama had just become president, and we patiently awaited the withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, the closing of Guantanamo Bay, and the passage of healthcare reform. After eight years of a second Bush presidency, some of us considered this the dawn of a new liberal U.S. and we, as naïve college students, wanted to brand ourselves as part of that new U.S.

On November 8th, voters had a choice between two pro-capitalist candidates, after a primary season with a viable democratic socialist candidate. Voter apathy after years of economic neglect and racist voter suppression by the GOP took their toll.

He undermines the free press through clear lies and threats. He directs federal agencies to ignore the checks and balances provided by the rulings of the judiciary and re-shuffle to increase his personal power.

On January 23, Donald Trump signed executive orders to build the wall along the Mexican border and changed the terms of engagement of the federal Border Patrol. If this order is found constitutional, the Border Patrol and ICE could subject millions of immigrants to deportations. He also issued an order threatening to withdraw federal funds from the more than 300 U.S. cities that have declared themselves sanctuaries for immigrant students, workers, and members of their families. Targeting sanctuary cities in this way is contrary to U.S. law and the constitution

A crowd fills Independence Avenue during the Women's March on Washington, Saturday, January 21, 2017 in Washington. AP Photo/ Alex Brandon

By Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen

Saturday’s day of protest—against Donald Trump and for women’s equality—was successful in two significant ways.

First, it was the largest one-day protest in American history. Based on news reports from cities around the country, as many as 4.5 million people took to the streets. From 750,000 people in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles to 250,000 in Chicago, 60,000 in Atlanta, 26,000 in Des Moines, and 271 in Morris, Minnesota (with a population of 3,500 and only two stoplights), protesters took over America on Trump’s second day in office.

On election night I felt a great sadness for America — not a Democratic or Republican sadness, but a sadness for the heart and soul of the nation. It is impossible to react to the election of Donald Trump with anything less than moral outrage. Trump is, as David Remnick wrote for The New Yorker, “vulgarity unbounded [1],” and his election has not only struck fear in the hearts of the vulnerable but also given rise to hundreds of documented cases of harassment and intimidation

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign brought the menace of the “Patriot” movement from the margins to the center of national politics, and there is no reason to think the militiarization of our politics will now fade into the background.

In his book The American Left and Some British Comparisons, published in 1971, the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith sought to analyze the persistent shortcomings of the Democratic Party. The stakes, he believed, were quite high, as the collapse of the New Deal order seemed imminent. Almost 50 years later, Galbraith's study makes for striking reading. Take, for example, the following observation:

"Everything considered," Galbraith wrote, "if the test of the success of a party is the quality and number of its office holders, the Democrats are not doing well."

In the wake of Donald Trump’s stunning and disastrous Electoral College victory, analysts have zeroed in on one demographic group that bears the burden for Hillary Clinton’s defeat: white voters without college degrees.

Crudely grouped under the rubric “white working class,” these voters helped push Trump past Clinton in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

After immigrating from China, Lynn Wang’s parents lived in the United States for three decades without encountering discrimination or racial abuse, until the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign.

“My mom was leaving yoga, and a woman from our hometown just pulled up next to her, leaned out of her car and started calling her racial slurs,” said Wang, a student at the University of Southern California. “We’ve been in Manhattan Beach for decades and never had that kind of thing happen before.”

Since the election results of November 8, shock has compounded shock. The initial shock was the surprise victory of Donald Trump, and the Republican Party throughout the country. The second has been the immediate turnaround on the part of commentators from shock and surprise to confident analysis and prognostication. It took virtually no time for the intelligentsia—pseudo- and otherwise—to reheat an old dish and serve up the culprit to be feasted on: the white working class. Endlessly discovered and rediscovered, from the hardhats of 1972 through the Reagan Democrats of 1984 and the Angry White Men of 1994, professionals have also wasted little time in projecting fantasy after fantasy onto this impossibly vast and intellectually diverse group of people (around 42 percent of the country). Barbara Ehrenreich dissected the lurid imaginings of the middle classes about the working classes in Fear of Falling (1989) in the wake of the victories of Nixon and Reagan. Now, as then, writers have launched blithely into trivial essays on what the voters wanted, more often through modes of inquiry resembling divination than actual reporting or analysis.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.